The easier way to understand, reduce and offset your carbon footprint
Lower your environmental impact with smarter Carbon Accounting.
CarbonTrail makes it easy for businesses to understand and take ownership of their carbon emissions, by automating the process of carbon accounting.
How CarbonTrail Helps
Easy to get started
Simply connect CarbonTrail to your accounting software. We'll do the hard calculations behind the scenes.
Cost Effective
Using CarbonTrail reduces the cost of carbon auditing and management whilst still achieving your impact goals.
Saves You Time
We automate and simplify data gathering, saving you weeks of waiting and manual effort across the year.
Action orientated
See clear opportunities to hit reduction targets by measuring businesses operations and suppliers.
Act now. Prepare for changing business standards.
Large brands demand more from suppliers
Major emitters, regulated organisations and industry bodies are requiring their supply chain to reduce emissions so they can meet their own targets. Brands are on record stating that those suppliers who aren't improving their sustainability will be dropped.
Shoppers prefer sustainable products
Many Kiwi's are trying to build responsible businesses, but greenwashing concerns loom heavy. Brands must evidence their efforts to avoid reputation damage, but those who can will tap into valuable new spending behaviour.
Governments are legislating to achieve targets
In 2021 New Zealand became the worlds first country to mandate climate change reporting for some businesses. Internationally we're seeing increasing requirements to report greenhouse gas emissions, and NZ SMEs should prepare for regulation.
How does CarbonTrail work?
Connect your accounting software
CarbonTrail looks at your business spend data, and applies emissions factors from a range of quality NZ sources to calculate your carbon footprint (scope 1, 2 and 3). By taking action and connecting your data you can use our badge to promote your carbon reduction ambitions.
Measure and reduce your impact
Baseline your carbon emissions and report on how business purchasing decisions affect carbon emissions. Set your own targets, or work with our partner Sustainability Consultants to achieve a recognised Carbon Certification such as Carbon Neutral ISO16064. Or as part of your B Corp application.
Offset unavoidable emissions
Some of your emissions will be unavoidable, and for those we allow easy 1-click offsetting through a partnership with CarbonZ. You'll get a certificate evidencing your carbon credits using their Aotearoa New Zealand native forest projects.
Improve your accuracy
CarbonTrail's sophisticated AI can calculate your emissions, but we're continually working on how we incorporate more of the precise data that's personalised for your organisation. Business can also connect with their suppliers, for accurate end-to-end tracking of hard to measure Scope 3 emissions.
What our customers say
"We had heard stories of consultants taking weeks to come up with a number, we didn’t have the appetite for this type of exercise, but CarbonTrail made it super simple to plug into Xero and get a number calculated extremely quickly"
Talk to Tom, the founder of CarbonTrail, and get started on your carbon footprint estimate today!
Frequently Asked Questions
What are carbon emissions?
As organisations make things or provide services, they will generate emissions either from their direct activities, such as delivering a package, or indirectly through their "value chain", such as purchasing stock.
Emissions contribute to climate change by affecting the makeup of gases in our atmosphere, causing the world to heat up, which leads to more extreme weather events amongst other things.
How do I calculate/measure my carbon footprint?
To calculate your carbon footprint, you need to understand your direct emissions and those of your value chain. There are a number of tools available to figure out what this number is. You can use the numbers generated to offset your operations and reduce your emissions over time.
Classically, this was done by consultants, but CarbonTrail wants to democratise this process and make it available to everyone. For those on Xero, CarbonTrail Starter is a free-of-charge solution that leverages CarbonTrail’s smart automation to calculate your business's carbon footprint.
What is carbon accounting?
Measuring and calculating your emission is known as Carbon Accounting. Standard carbon accounting is highly manual and can take weeks of work to find and record your emissions, examples include your energy, utilities, computer equipment and anything else you've bought or used as a business. Global standards differentiates each by 'scope'.
How does CarbonTrail work?
CarbonTrail uses a number of data sources to produce as precise of an estimation of your organisation’s carbon footprint as possible. The types of industries where your organisation spends its money – and the amount of money you spend in them – will therefore influence the calculated emissions.
How accurate is CarbonTrail?
We need to start by saying that it is not possible to work out an “exact” carbon footprint for anything. Even the most accurate emissions calculations suffer from truncation errors – since the number of factors potentially influencing the carbon footprint of something is (literally) infinite, you always have to draw a line somewhere and sacrifice some amount of ‘accuracy’.
This means that, really, carbon footprinting exercises are therefore better or worse, as opposed to accurate or inaccurate.
We stand by our methodology. Every exported report shows the factors used to reach the number, which can then be independently verified.
Is my data secure?
Yes, we use industry-standard encryption and data protection methodologies to ensure that your sensitive financial data is looked after.
We use Amazon Web Services for hosting and data management, often using their managed services which are guaranteed by Amazon themselves.
Finally, only your organisation’s expenditure data is imported to CarbonTrail. We access your accounting data as read-only, and our staff do not have access to your data without your explicit consent.
How do you manage carbon emissions?
Managing carbon emissions is a balancing act between identifying our impact and the contributors to it, then assessing the reduction opportunities. Many organisations establish an annual sustainability plan with initiatives to offset an assumed carbon impact. With CarbonTrail businesses can quantify their impact as well as their reduction efforts, making sustainability a part of everyday business.
How do you reduce a carbon footprint?
The first step is to know where your carbon emissions are coming from. If you’re seeing a significant portion of your monthly emissions coming from your power usage, then energy efficient bulbs or timer-switches could be viable options for you. When using CarbonTrail you can view your top-emitting categories and suppliers.
